Never Unprepared

Credits enginepublishing.com
PO Box 571992
Author: Phil Vecchione
Publisher: Martin Ralya Murray, UT 84157
Editor: Martin Ralya
Art Director: John Arcadian Never Unprepared: The Complete
Graphic Designer: Darren Hardy Game Master’s Guide to Session
Layout: Darren Hardy Prep is copyright © 2012 by Phil
Cover Artist: Matt Morrow
Cover Designer: Darren Hardy Vecchione, all rights reserved,
Interior Artists: Matt Morrow, Christopher Reach and is published by Engine
Diagrams: Phil Vecchione
Indexers: Martin Ralya, Phil Vecchione Publishing, LLC with permission.
Proofreaders: Robert M. Everson, Daniel Milne
Capitalist Tool: Kurt Schneider All artwork is copyright ©
2012 by Engine Publishing,
In memory of Eric Wujcik
LLC, all rights reserved.
With special thanks to my Keurig and
my “fatman” chair, who supported me Engine Publishing, the Engine
throughout my writing. –P.V. Publishing Logo, and the truncated

gear device are trademarks of
Engine Publishing, LLC.

Gnome Stew, The Game Mastering
Blog, and the Gnome Stew logo
are trademarks of Martin Ralya.

Mention of ©, ®, or TM products
and services is not intended as a
challenge to those rights or marks,
or to their holders. All such products

and services are the property
of their respective owners.

The Engine Publishing logo was
designed by Darren Hardy.

Published by Engine Publishing,
LLC in July 2012.

Dedication

To my wife Florence, for putting me onto this path, and
supporting all my gaming and other endeavors over the years.

To my children, Dante and Rose:
Embrace your creativity in all you do.

To my gaming group, who were the lab rats for all my
tinkering and experimentation as this process evolved. –P.V.

2

Contents

Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
How to Use This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Understanding Prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

1: Prep is Not a Four Letter Word. . . . . . . 10
2: The Phases of Prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3: Brainstorming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4: Selection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
5: Conceptualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
6: Documentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
7: Review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Prep Toolbox. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
8: Tools for Prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
9: Mastering Your Creative Cycle. . . . . . . 75
Evolving Your Style. . . . . . . . . . . . . .85
10: Your Personal Prep Templates. . . . . . . 86
11: The Prep-Lite Approach . . . . . . . . . . 99
12: Prep in the Real World. . . . . . . . . . 106
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
References and Inspiration. . . . . . . . . 119
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Contributor Bios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

3

Foreword

“Why didn’t I think of this?”

That’s the first question I asked myself when Phil asked me to write
this foreword. As I read through his introduction and took a good,
hard look at what he’s accomplished here, there was a strong urge
to slap my hand to my forehead.

This book is a great idea!

Fortunately, I didn’t think of it first because, as it turns out, Phil is
exactly the guy to do it the right way.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got plenty of ideas to share, plenty of
insight on the concept, and plenty of experience in the field. What
I don’t have, however, is a process—at least, not one that is thought
out well enough to share in any meaningful way.

Phil, on the other hand, has taken his expertise as a project man-
ager and his genetic predisposition to nigh-obsessive preparedness
and applied these qualities to an entirely systemic and effective
treatise on the matter. He’s broken down the whole of the concept,
applied a step-by-step presentation of all of the factors you need to
consider, and presented it all in a clear, concise, easily grasped way.

Most importantly, he’s demystified the whole concept of “game
prep.” It’s no longer the boogie-man waiting at your desk a couple
of hours before game time, ready to stress you out beyond measure
before people start showing up for your game. It’s also no longer
that arduous, tedious task you have to force yourself to close the
latest MMORPG or YouTube video to drudge through during the
week. It’s a reasonable, manageable task that will actually be fun to
perform, and it will take a lot of stress off of you by the time that
first player arrives.

The best part of this book is that Phil doesn’t just lay out a list of
steps that every GM must follow to the letter. Honestly, that would
be fairly useless as well as pretentious. A wiser man, Phil, in that
he instead guides you in evaluating your needs as a GM, based on
your style of play. From there, he helps you figure out the steps that
make the most sense for you.

4

Foreword

Look, I’m fairly known in some gaming circles as a classic example
of the improvisational game master. In fact, the concept of the “anal
vortex” was coined by friends of mine years ago to represent how
I seem to be able to pull something out of somewhere to make my
games work the way they do. There was, in fact, a time I could liter-
ally just drop a game out of my head at a moment’s notice (there’s a
rather famous incident where I was handed nothing more than the
GM’s screen for the first Star Wars RPG—the West End Games
one—and, having never run or played before, I ran a complete sce-
nario at a game club meeting because there was no one else to do it).
Here’s the thing, though. I want to run the kinds of games that
people enjoy, remember, and talk about. With all that I have going
on in my life these days, doing that means I have to spend some
time and effort getting things ready. I need bad guys written up, I
need a sense of what story arcs are at work, and I need to have some
important scenes roughed out that I know will pay off my players’
expectations. I’ve started improving my preparation process to a de-
gree, because I’ve had to.
One thing I can tell you, though, is that I really appreciate this
book. I’m getting some great ideas from it, and I believe my players
are going to benefit a lot from what I learn from Phil.
Your players will, too. Trust me.
Sean Patrick Fannon
Creator of Shaintar,
Author of The Fantasy Roleplaying Gamer’s Bible
Huntsville, AL
April 2012

5

Introduction

I’ve never read an RPG or supplement that has told me how to prep for my sessions.
Most of them talk about encounter building and campaign planning, but none of
them lay out what information needs to be in my session notes, how long my notes
should be, or even the best way to record them. I don’t know if that’s an unrealistic
expectation to place on game designers, but since the dawn of the hobby we GMs
have been left to wander in the desert trying to figure out how to prep our sessions.

The RPG blogging community has done some work to help advance this aspect of
GMing, but the number of articles on how one should prepare their session notes
is drowned out by a deluge of articles on how to speed up combat, the best class
combinations to take, and the reasons to love/hate every version of Dungeons &
DragonsTM. If you’re lucky, you may stumble on the occasional article with some
nuggets of information which, through trial and error, can be cobbled together into
some kind of system to prepare for your game.

The end result is that many GMs hate to prepare their session notes. I have yet to
encounter a GM who is excited to prepare their notes—at best, they have made some
kind of uneasy truce when it comes to getting their prep work done. Not me: I am
a GM who likes to do my prep. Not because I like to give up time for other forms
of leisure to write encounters, but rather because I have come to appreciate that the
time I spend on my prep will make the games that I run so much better. I have also
created a personal system whereby I am not a slave to my prep; instead, my prep is a
minor to-do accomplished in the course of my day.

My goals in writing this book are to share my own experiences with, and techniques
for, session prep; and to make prep much less painful—and perhaps even pleasant—
for GMs. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first gaming book ever written
exclusively about game prep.

What I share in Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session
Prep is not a specific method for how to prepare for a game. That kind of approach is
novel but inflexible and will become stale as our hobby continues to evolve. Rather
this book looks at prep in a more holistic way, identifying its role and your specific
needs, but will require you to determine how to meet those needs. Don’t worry,
though: There are plenty of tips and suggestions on how to do exactly that in this
book.

When you have completed the book, uncovered those needs, and worked to solve
them, the end result will be your prep system—and you will know how to grow and
adapt that system as you run different games and embark on different campaigns.

Phil Vecchione
Buffalo, NY
March 2012

6

How to Use this Book

Never Unprepared is designed to be read, internalized, and adapted for your own use
as a GM. Whether you’ve run a few games, never run one, or have run hundreds or
thousands of sessions, you’ll find things in this book that you can put to use right
away to improve, streamline, and better understand your prep process.

Why a Book about Game Prep?

I’m hardwired at the genetic level to prepare for things: Through my maternal
bloodline I am half-Scottish, and come from the Johnston clan. Our clan motto
is Nunquam non paratus, “Never Unprepared.” And while this trait does not carry
through to all of my relatives, it is strongly expressed in me. I am rarely without a
pocketknife, and I always have just what I need in my work bag. I hate to be caught
unprepared and am at my most comfortable when I have done my research before
any significant event.

I have been a gamer since 1982 and have been a GM for nearly all of those years.
I cut my teeth on the Moldvay D&D Basic Set and crafted my first dungeons on
graph paper from the stationery store. Over the years I have run numerous cam-
paigns under a variety of systems, and I’ve written out my session notes in many

Artist: Christopher Reach

7

How to Use this Book

different ways. I have written and run thousands of sessions, and have been un-
derprepared, over-prepared, and sometimes just prepared enough. In the course of
running those games, I’ve developed a good feel for what common elements appear
in the prep for any game.

When I am not in my basement gaming (yes, I game in my basement), writing gam-
ing books (I was one of the authors and designers, as well as the project manager,
of Engine Publishing’s two first books, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game
Masters and Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game), or writing
articles for the GMing blog Gnome Stew (gnomestew.com), which I’ve done since
2008, I am a project manager by profession. As a project manager I have experience
in time estimates, scheduling, and planning. I have an understanding of how to take
something complicated, break it up in to manageable parts, and then tackle them
over time in order to achieve a goal.

The culmination of all of this has been a journey, undertaken over the past 10 years,
to understand session prep and how to hack it for best effect. It is through trial and
error that I have assembled the concepts and elements presented in this book, with
the hope that the things that I have learned can benefit other GMs.

The Breakdown

Here’s what you’ll find in each section of Never Unprepared. Each section builds
upon the others.

Understanding Prep

To really dive into how to build your own system for prep, we have to understand
the nature of prep. First we’ll look at the role of prep and its phases, and then we’ll
break down those phases and look at each step and its importance. In this section
you will come to understand your own prep cycle and to identify the phases where
you’re strongest, and those where you need to develop your skills.

Prep Toolbox

In the next section we’ll look at some of the components that go into creating your
notes. We’ll look at various tools to create prep notes; we’ll also talk about creative
cycles and energies, and how to do the right things at the right time. Then we will
address creating a personal prep template that complements your style.

Evolving Your Style

In the final section, we’ll talk about how to evolve and adapt your style as you gain
experience. We will also address how to re-evaluate your tools when you switch
games and as technology changes.

8

Understanding Prep

Artist: Christopher Reach 9

Chapter 1: Prep is
Not a Four-Letter Word

When you say “session prep” to most GMs, they imagine a pile of handwritten notes
spread across a table; a kudzu of loose-leaf and ink attempting to consume any free
space it can find. They have blood-chilling visions of sitting at a desk like a monk
penning a copy of the Bible, writing endlessly in silence. They have flashbacks of
high school and college term papers, pulling all-nighters to get them finished in
time, and the fatigue and the low-level self-loathing that comes from making your-
self stay up all night for nothing more than homework.

Session preparation is the act of preparing oneself as the GM for an upcoming ses-
sion where you will run a game for your players. Session preparation (which I will
call prep from now on) is related to campaign preparation, which is the act of orga-
nizing information for a campaign, or series of sessions. This book addresses session
prep, but some of the concepts presented are applicable to campaign prep as well.

Prep has become a much-maligned part of the GMing process, with many GMs
confessing that they enjoy running games but not doing the prep for them. This in
turn leads some to follow the path of the improvisational GM, who doesn’t prep
anything but instead lets the game organically flow from her mind. While that’s a
fine skill to have, for most of us some kind of notes are necessary, be it a map, a few
note cards with some plot points, or 15 pages of story material.

There are also types of stories that are best not run off the cuff. An intricate mystery
with numerous red herrings, a complex political thriller, and a game centered on an
ancient conspiracy are all types of plots where having notes about what is going on
is beneficial to the GM and the players. Running those sorts of games without notes
carries a high risk of not correctly conveying the small details and facts that are the
key to making those kinds of plots work.

As for not liking prep, it is my belief that the reason that many GMs do not enjoy it
is because they are doing it wrong. That may sound bold, and I will defend that point
later on in the chapter, but I think that prep has been given a bad reputation over the
years. In the way that many parts of our hobby are passed down from experienced
GM to new GM, I think that we older GMs have perpetuated the belief that at best
prep is some kind of necessary evil and not an enjoyable, creative process.

The Goal of Prep

Every GM, experienced or new, has been in this situation: on the spot, facing your
players, when something unexpected has happened in the game and you are search-
ing for what to do next. It could be that the players have attacked the king, or the
party has decided to explore the hex to the west and not the one to the north, or
the mage attempted to bluff the villain into revealing his master plan and succeed-

10 ed. In those situations, we freeze up for a moment as our minds scramble to

Prep is Not a Four-Letter Word

determine how to resolve the event. In that moment of thought, as time seems to be
crawling and the attention of your players is running out like sand in an hourglass,
wouldn’t it be great to look over at your backup GM and have him whisper the an-
swer to you, allowing play to resume?

In essence that is what our prep is: It’s our backup GM. The outcome of good game
prep is the organization of the information we need to keep our game running and
our players immersed in the game.

GMing is in many ways like radio, where silence is death. When I was in college I
was a DJ at the college station, rocking out metal at 10:00 in the morning. The first
lesson they teach you is that having dead air is the worst thing that you can do. If
someone is listening to your station and the song ends, and another song does not
start right away, people reach for the dial and move to the next station. You’re taught
to do anything to avoid that silence, from timing your songs so that one flows into
the next, to jumping on the mic and jabbering away until you can get the next song
going.

GMing is no different: Silence is death. When a session is in full swing and you are
narrating the scene, judging the players’ actions, and playing the roles of the NPCs,
your players are hopefully following you. When this is running at its best, there are
moments when the walls of the gaming space melt away, when you see your players
as their characters and they see your narrative as the world around them. In those
moments you have reached true immersion, the zone of RPGs. When you reach
that zone, you want to stay there as long as possible; those are the moments that we
all—players and GMs alike—remember for years to come.

The last thing you want to do in one of those moments is to fall silent because you’re
unprepared. When that happens, immersion is broken and the gaming table slowly
devolves into building dice towers, book flipping, and sidebar conversations. The
longer the silence goes on the more disruptive those behaviors become, and the
harder it will be to return to that immersive state when play resumes.

Prep is what prevents those moments of silence. The more prepared you are, the less
often those moments of silence will occur in your game and the better your chances
are of reaching that immersive state and remaining in the zone. In other words:

The goal of prep is to give the GM a level of comfort through
the understanding that all the information they need to run

the game as smoothly as possible is readily at hand.

Prep is not just about written notes; it is a mindset for being prepared to run your
game. Are there written notes involved? For most of us, myself included, there are—
but there are other GMs who require only an index card, or even just the thoughts
in their head, to run a session. Regardless of how many notes you have, you still
need to be prepared; to have done your prep. Many factors go into your prep,

11

Artist: Matt Morrow

including your experience as a GM, the game you are playing, your ability to memo-
rize information, etc. What the final product of your prep looks like will be deter-
mined by you, and will change as you grow as a GM and play different games.

What Makes Good Prep

Prep must have four basic attributes in order for it to be useful. First, it must be ac-
cessible. You must be able to get to your prep when you need it. Second, it must be
organized. You need to be able to find a specific item at the moment you need it.
Third, it must be effective. The information that you locate must be helpful to you
when you find it. Fourth, it must be reliable. You need to know with confidence that
when you need the information it will be there and not have vanished.

What I just described are the high-level requirements for any database system from
a recipe app on your smart phone to the most complex banking servers. Our prep is
a database. It contains information that needs to be organized, stored, and retrieved.
When one of the above attributes fail, then our prep may fail us at a crucial moment
during the game.

When someone designs a database, they identify requirements in advance: what
platform it will run on, what data it will contain, how data will be indexed, etc. In
the case of prep, it has been my experience that we don’t put the same structured
thought into our notes, and thus we may overlook a critical requirement that our
prep needs to fulfill to be the most useful to us. It’s not really our fault, though, be-

12 cause prep isn’t something we as GMs talk much about.

Prep is Not a Four-Letter Word

The First Rule of Prep Is:
We Do Not Talk about Prep

As gamers we often talk a lot about our hobby. We can spend hours discussing the
best class and feat combos, share tips on how to make the best horror adventures, or
argue until the sun comes up about rolling the dice in front of or behind the screen.
What we don’t spend a lot of time talking about is how to prep for our games. We
all have our own way to do it, but we often don’t share tips on how we actually do it.
It is a solemn ritual that every GM seems to have to discover on her own.

We should talk more about prep, and should share our ideas, tips, and tricks. Many
GMs who stop running games—or worse, stop GMing all together—often cite not
having enough time to prep their game as the reason they quit. In a hobby that needs
every GM it can find, prep should not be a reason to turn in your GM’s screen.

My own style of prep was conceived largely without input from other GMs. Some
of the tools I use were suggested by friends, but the contents of my notes, and the
system I use to plan the time to write them each week, were discovered by trial and
error—a lot of errors. Over the years I evolved a style of prep that I became comfort-
able with, but I never really understood why it worked. I just stuck to it because it
did.

When I became a father, something wonderful happened: Being a dad is insanely
awesome. Something terrible happened as well: My free time vanished. Suddenly
my tried-and-true approach to prep was falling victim to a massive time crunch.
With no real resources to draw upon, I started to work at my prep and find ways to
make it fit into my new, much tighter, schedule. Along the way I learned some valu-
able lessons.

You’re Doing It Wrong

The pain that people feel when they prep their game is due to the fact that their sys-
tem of preparation isn’t aligned with their needs. I’ve run a lot of games in my tenure
as a GM, and I’ve talked to hundreds of other GMs, both successful and struggling.
When I hear complaints about prep, they often fall into one of four categories.

Writing Too Much

This is the most common reason that GMs dislike prep: They are simply writing
too many notes. They often do this because when they first learned to play, they
took copious notes to make sure they were well-prepared for their sessions. Over the
years they have grown as GMs and their skill at handling the game on the fly has
improved, but they are still writing volumes of notes.

13

Chapter 1

A common question that I’m asked when I am on GMing panels at conventions is
“How long should my notes be for a session?” My answer for this is always the same:
As long as you need them to be to comfortably run your game. Less experienced
GMs often need more (and more detailed) notes because it makes them feel com-
fortable GMing. More experienced GMs often require fewer notes because they fill
in the gaps with their improvisational skills. What GMs often fail to do is to review
their skills and attempt to trim down their notes as they grow in experience.

Poor Tools, or Tools You Are Not Excited About

Another common issue with the way people prep is that they are either not using the
proper tools to do their prep, or not using tools that they actually enjoy using. There’s
no denying that prep is a form of work, and like any kind of work the proper tools
are required to get the job done. Your tools need to be matched to the way you work.
When you use tools that match your style of prep, and find tools that are interest-
ing or even fun to use, it makes the act of creating your notes more exciting and can
remove the frustration that many GMs feel when doing prep.

Not Understanding Your Creative Cycle and Schedule

The final issue that I have seen GMs encounter is one that is often overlooked by
most people: understanding their creative cycle. Our ability to be creative ebbs and
flows throughout the day—some people are more creative in the morning, while
others are more creative in the evening (and so forth). Trying to perform a creative
activity when you are at a creative low point can be a very painful process—and one
where the fruit of your labor pales when compared to what you could have done
when you were at your creative peak.

In addition to understanding your creative cycle, you need to understand your per-
sonal schedule. Many people fail to leave themselves enough time in their busy
schedules to get their prep done, so they either feel stressed from rushing or they
fail to finish their prep and wind up canceling game sessions. By being aware of
your personal schedule and the commitments that are part of your life, you can then
properly plan to get your prep done in a relaxed manner.

It’s Time to Make Peace

Prep is not a terrible thing. If it’s part of the foundation of having a great game and
the experiences that come from running a great game, then prep is a valuable ally. In
order to make peace with prep, we need to better understand our creative processes,
our needs as GMs, and the things going on in our lives. When we make the time
for prep, give ourselves the most comfortable tools, and know what we need to ac-
complish, prep becomes a natural and painless process and our games will benefit
from being more prepared.

14

Chapter 2:
The Phases of Prep

A common misconception is that prep is the thing you do when you write your notes
or draw the maps for your upcoming game. Prep begins before that, and it goes
through a series of phases that can eventually yield a stack of notes and maps. Dif-
ferent people place emphasis on different phases, and people have varying skill levels
in each phase. Mastery of each of the phases of prep will make you very good at this
critical aspect of GMing.

When we talk about the prep process we are talking about starting with nothing
and progressing to a set of notes, maps, and other useful tools that we need for an
upcoming game. This is not only the written material we require for the game, but
also the mental preparation that allows us to run the material in a session. How we
get from nothing to notes is a process that can be broken down into a number of
discrete phases. At each phase we move closer to being prepared to run the game.

How This Came About

I did not set out to define the phases of prep; I came across them naturally as I began
to take an interest in productivity and life hacking (the latter being the practice of
using tricks, shortcuts, and various other methods to increase efficiency in different

Artist: Christopher Reach 15

Chapter 2

areas of one’s life—see lifehacker.com for more). I began to read a lot of articles about
the creative process and how people in various creative endeavors, from artists and
designers to those in advertising, actually worked. At the time, I was a software de-
veloper; this too is a creative endeavor, even if the medium you work in is somewhat
more structured.

I began to take things that I read and apply them to my gaming, specifically the
creative process of coming up with an adventure (or story or plot, if you prefer). The
more I did this the more I began to see that the overall process of prep was much
more than just writing my notes. I began to notice the early phases, the intangible
stage of the creative process where ideas are born. As this introspection continued I
started to see the boundaries between one process and the next. I explored the mean-
ing of each one, and looked for how each phase contributed to the whole process.

The outcome of this process of observation was a more full understanding of a par-
ticular creative process for prep. Based on talking to friends and fellow GMs, I
believe that this is a natural process that many of us follow, in most cases without
really understanding it.

The Phases

Prep has five phases. Collectively, these take the roughest of ideas and hone it into a
scene or story. Your brain naturally goes through these phases, and it’s possible that
you might not always be aware that they are occurring. The phases of prep are:

1. Brainstorming 4. Documentation
2. Selection 5. Review
3. Conceptualization

Brainstorming

This phase is when ideas are spawned. At this stage they are rough, unrefined
thoughts about the story or a given scene, or sometimes even just a line of dialog
within a scene. Ideas are just that: small and incomplete. They lack the refinement of
a fully formed thought. They don’t always make sense; they can be silly, serious, or
even inappropriate. Their power comes from their nearly limitless potential. Because
of their imperfection and incomplete nature, they don’t have to conform to any rules.
They are what they are: possibility in its rawest form.

Brainstorming can happen nearly anywhere and under a wide variety of conditions.
It can happen spontaneously while driving to work, talking to a friend, or even
sitting in a meeting. Some people rely on ideas appearing randomly, calling them
flashes of insight or strokes of genius. Others learn to refine this exercise and are able
to enter a highly creative state in which they generate lots of ideas about a given topic

(or many topics). The best example of this is in the field of advertising, which

16

The Phases of Prep

combines a highly creative process with crushing deadlines and competition; if you
don’t churn out a lot of ideas, and quickly, you lose.

When we brainstorm we generate a host of unrefined ideas, each of which has a
chance of being something that we may use in an upcoming game. Not every idea
can be used as soon as it springs to mind, though, and that’s where the process of
selection comes in.

Selection

This is the phase where we select the ideas that we want to use in our upcoming
game. Every idea generated during brainstorming has the potential to be a good
idea. In this phase, we apply a dose of reality to that pool of ideas and narrow the
field to one idea—or a handful of ideas—that we will then refine.

In this way you become like the gem cutter who examines several rough stones, ana-
lyzes them, looks for characteristics that make for a favorable stone, and selects the
best candidates to cut. Some stones will be so obviously high-quality that you know
they should be cut immediately, others you’ll hold onto to cut another day, and some
you’ll discard because they will never yield a worthy gem.

How you sort your ideas and select the best ones will have a lot to do with under-
standing the kind of game you are running and the players who are participating
in the game. You will need to understand what fits within the campaign world and
what breaks the fourth wall. You need to be aware of what kinds of stories interest
your players and what stories will disengage or even upset them. You will also need
to understand your own abilities as a GM and determine if a given idea is something
that you think you can pull off in a game.

At the end of the sorting, your idea isn’t really any more fully formed than it was
when it was conceived during brainstorming, but now it has passed through a few
logical filters and been found worthy of additional thought and consideration. You
then need to build out this idea into something more usable in a process called con-
ceptualization, the next phase of prep.

Conceptualization

In the conceptualization phase we now take each idea and expand upon it; we apply
logic, give it a description, and fit it into the overall game. Where the brainstorming
phase was about limitless possibly, conceptualization is about making your idea work
within the reality of your game.

For an idea to be useable within a game, you need to make sure that it fits into the

logic of the story. What characters or groups are involved in this idea and what are

they doing? Do those things make sense based on what you already know about your

game? How will you mechanically express some of the actions or elements of the

world? Do those fit within the rules of the game? 17

Chapter 2

The answers to these questions are what frame the idea and and allow you to inte-
grate it into your story and your game. At times this process is as straightforward as
putting a few orcs in a cavern, but at other times it is the challenging task of deter-
mining why an NPC ally may wish to betray the PCs. In some cases the great idea
that you conceived isn’t strong enough to hold up under closer scrutiny and must be
discarded.

Once you have fully conceptualized an idea and know it’s strong enough to use in
the game, the next step is to capture and organize a number of details about that idea
during the documentation phase.

Documentation

Documentation is the part of the prep process that most people associate with prep,
but as you can see it is really the fourth step in the overall process. In the documen-
tation phase, you write down your concept in a way that’s meaningful to you. What
medium you use and what you write down is determined by your needs as a GM.

You may prefer to handwrite your notes, or perhaps dictate them to a voice-to-text
editor. Some GMs like an elaborate binder with multiple sections, while others only
want a few sticky notes. In terms of what’s written down, some GMs write full de-
scriptions of locations and NPCs while others write a bulleted list of key identifiers.
Sometimes a GM will do her entire documentation in one sitting, while another
GM prefers to break his documentation into multiple sittings.

The documentation phase encompasses many parts of preparing for a gaming ses-
sion. The most common item created during this process is your session notes, the
details of the encounters and scenes that comprise the session. Documentation also
includes creating maps, generating monster and NPC stats, and creating any coun-
ters, tokens, or similar tools you might need. This phase encompasses the creation of
all of the physical or digital components that you may need in the session.

Many GMs consider the act of documenting their notes to be the end of the prep
process, but there’s one more phase that will keep you from missing key elements
that might cause problems during the session: the review phase.

Review

In the final phase of prep, your documentation gets refined and any errors or prob-
lems are identified and fixed. This often-overlooked phase can have a big impact
on the quality of the material you present during the game. This process identifies
things like plot holes, bad dialog, or an over- or underpowered encounter.

The review phase is the dress rehearsal for your prep. With all of the ideas
selected and fleshed out into concepts, and those concepts documented, you can
then review your session notes in their entirety and check for issues. Perhaps there’s

18

The Phases of Prep

a missing clue without which you can’t get the players from one scene to the next, or
you overlooked the spell list for the evil wizard. This is the time to find those errors
and correct them.

Besides looking for errors, the review phase is the time to look at how prepared you
are to run the scenes that you’ve prepped for the upcoming session. Perhaps one
scene involves a bridge over a raging river. Do you know the falling and drowning
rules for this system off the top of your head? If not, this would be a good time to
look at them and perhaps put a bookmark in that section of your rulebook.

It’s More Natural than You Think

With the phases of prep broken out like this, you may think that the process sounds
unnatural, but it’s just the opposite. In many instances, this is exactly how our minds
work, and we often progress through this process naturally. When presented with
a problem, we usually generate a pool of possible solutions, select the strong candi-
dates, elaborate on a selected solution, test it out, and refine it based on our initial
test. So if this process is natural, why even talk about it? For two reasons: command
and consistency.

Being a good GM means not being a slave to your creative process; your imagination
isn’t a mental desert and you don’t need to wait for drops of inspiration to rain down
upon you. As GMs, we need to be able to prep for our sessions on demand, whether
for the game next week or the game you’re running an hour from now because a
good friend showed up unexpectedly. Your ability to come up with good ideas and
to be sufficiently prepared to run a game should be under your command, able to be
summoned at your will.

When you bring your creative process to bear, you want to be as consistent in the
process as possible. In the next few chapters, we’ll discuss each phase in more detail
and will address what happens when you complete a phase poorly or not at all. By
studying each of the phases and working to improve ourselves in all of them, we can
move towards a more even creative process that yields a stronger product—the sum
total of your prep—because each phase was executed properly.

It Can Happen Anywhere, Anytime

The beauty of breaking prep down into phases is that this process doesn’t need to
happen in a special or specific environment. While you might not be able to write
your session notes while driving to work, you can brainstorm, select ideas, and con-
ceptualize even while sitting in traffic. When you have command of the process
you can engage in it wherever and whenever you have time. Having mastered each
phase, you can move your ideas along the continuum until they are fully formed.

19

Artist: Christopher Reach

I have done brainstorming while waiting in line to pay for groceries, gone through
the selection phase while standing in line at a fast food restaurant, and conceptual-
ized ideas while in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. I have documented my
session notes between meetings and mentally reviewed them in the shower. While
that may seem like overkill, when you have a spouse, a career, and children, the abil-
ity to prep a game during small slices of free time can be invaluable.

The Order of the Phases is Flexible

While the overall prep process progresses from the brainstorming phase to the re-
view phase, there will be times when you’ll need to move in the opposite direction.
The most common time for this need to arise is during during review when you
find something that just isn’t going to work in your upcoming session. You can then
slide back to documentation or even up to conceptualization to make the necessary
changes. Or you might find that you don’t have enough ideas for a complete story or
adventure, and solve this problem by sliding up the scale to brainstorming in order
to come up with an idea or two to fill the gap.

There’s nothing wrong with doing this; it’s a natural process. In fact it’s a strength
of this prep process that it enables you to go from concrete to abstract and back to
discrete when needed. We often do this as a reflex: It is summed up in the phrase
“back to the drawing board.” When we get stuck on something specific we need to
back up, expand our possibilities, chart a new course, and then proceed.

20

Chapter 3:
Brainstorming

The greatest stories that have ever been told all started with an idea. We start with
nothing and then from the empty expanse of limitless possibility comes an idea,
then another, and if we’re lucky they keep coming until a swarm of possibilities sur-
round us. Some will be great ideas and some will not. Now isn’t the time to judge
them, though; rather, like children running through a summer field in the evening
chasing fireflies, we need to chase down those ideas and catch them in a jar.

Brainstorming is an exciting mental exercise, but one that doesn’t always come natu-
rally to everyone. For every person who can close their eyes and let the ideas pour
forth, there’s a person who just stares at the wall in frustration. On top of that, many
people feel that inspiration must come to them at its fickle whim and not when
desired.

The truth is that brainstorming is a skill, and like all skills it can be learned and
practiced. If you have trouble believing that, consider the world of advertising. Ad-
vertisers have to create multiple ideas for marketing a product on a tight schedule,
often under pressure. They are able to deliver because they’ve trained themselves to
be creative on command. When your ability to brainstorm is properly developed it
can be used on demand as well. The first step to mastering this skill is to recognize
that it is just a skill and that it can be practiced and improved.

Making Something from Nothing

In terms of session preparation, the goal of brainstorming is to come up with the
idea or ideas that will eventually become the session you’re going to run. Every game
session or adventure can be summed up as one or more ideas. One idea may be the
basis for a whole adventure: “The agents will sneak into the hidden lab and steal the
deadly virus.” Another idea might be a sub-plot for a specific character: “Jean Bap-
tiste will encounter a female musketeer while off-duty.” Or you might have an idea
for a single scene: “Tabris will sneak into the fortress and assassinate the Demon
Knight.”

When you are brainstorming for a new session, ideally you want to come up with
the big idea that frames the entire adventure—but don’t discount a single scene or
sub-plot. While I prefer to come up with the big idea, I have centered sessions on
a smaller scene and built the rest of the session around that idea. You may also be
able to combine a big idea and a few smaller ones into one session, with the big idea
forming the main goal of the session and the smaller ideas forming scenes within
that adventure.

21

Chapter 3

Making the Rain

Brainstorming requires only a few ingredients: a clear mind, a place to think, some
time, and something you can use to capture ideas. When people are learning to
brainstorm or are not very proficient at it, they often need to be somewhere quiet,
with some time set aside. The act of brainstorming can be boiled down to posing a
single question—“What should I do in the next session?”—and then listening to the
answers that follow.

When I brainstorm I start with exactly that question. If nothing comes from that
process, then I ask myself an additional question, such as:

• What kind of session do I • Is there anything my players
want to have? (As in a chase, wanted to do?
a rolling fight, a heist, etc.)
• Is there an NPC or monster
• What would the major NPC that I want to use?
be doing right now?
• Is there a goal that I need the
• Do I want to focus on a PCs to accomplish? (Acquire a
specific character? holy artifact, get the big break
in the case, steal a secret weapon.)
• Is there a type of event I
want to occur? (A big battle,
a flood, a zombie outbreak.)

Often one of these questions will set off the brainstorming session. When the ideas
start coming I try to think of as many as I can and not focus on any details. I like to
capture these ideas in a list, either on paper or electronically. As I am making my list
there may be ideas that I’m drawn to more than others, but I try to avoid any bias
and just collect all of them. There is no set number of ideas I aim to collect in a given
session, but I don’t stop until I have more than one. Having options is better than
having just one idea.

When I collect my ideas, I keep it simple—often just a sentence or two written
down in a bulleted list. For a long time, the Moleskine® notebook was my medium
of choice for note-taking; I have stacks of worn black notebooks filled with various
RPG ideas. Within those pages were the seeds of a number of memorable adven-
tures, but they were greatly outnumbered by the hundreds of ideas that were never
touched (we’ll talk more about that in the next chapter).

When I first started brainstorming explicitly as an activity, I did so in a quiet room
with a pad of paper and a pen. I needed that quiet room to keep me from distractions.
As time went on and as my skill level improved, I learned that I could brainstorm in

22

Brainstorming

lots of places: between meetings at work, waiting at the doctor’s office, while grocery
shopping, etc. All I need now is a time when I don’t have to speak; from that baseline
I can clear my mind and begin the brainstorming process.

Spontaneous Bursts of Inspiration

Even after you hone your skill at brainstorming, there will still be times when flashes
of insight hit you like strokes of lightning. Those flashes are still of great value even
though they’re not part of the formal brainstorming process, as they often represent
your subconscious delivering to you an idea that was processing in the back of your
mind, waiting to take shape.

In those situations, it’s best if you have something on hand where you can write
down your new idea. Originally it was my little notebooks that were never far from
my reach, but as I’ve transitioned to digital tools that role is now occupied by Ever-
note® (evernote.com).

Brainstorming for a Purpose

In the previous examples of brainstorming I focused on having an open mind, ex-
ploring all sorts of ideas by allowing your mind the freedom to create spontaneously.
There are times, however, where you need specific ideas. For instance, you could be
writing a follow-up adventure to a previous session where the PCs were captured.
In this case, you don’t need every idea in the world—you need ideas about what the
PCs will encounter in prison and how they can escape.

In these cases you can rein in your brainstorming by setting some initial parameters.
The best way to do this is by changing the initial question that you ask yourself. By
making that question more limiting, you can focus your creative process on gener-
ating ideas within specific confines. You may still get a few “rogue” ideas, and you
should write them down; great ideas are sometimes born out of strange associations.
If your mind wanders and you find yourself in a place completely outside your origi-
nal confines, pose the initial question to yourself again, or ask a follow up question,
to focus your thoughts.

Another time where focused brainstorming is a valuable tool is when we have to
move backwards through the prep process. You could be in the conceptualization
phase when you realize that there are some areas of a scene or story that are incom-
plete, and you now need to generate some new ideas to fill in the gaps. Once ideas
have formed you can move back through the phases and incorporate them into your
developing scenario.

23

Chapter 3

When We Do Too Little

As in all phases of prep, when we don’t brainstorm enough our prep suffers. When
we don’t perform enough brainstorming we have a shortage of creative ideas for the
games we run. The first problem that creeps up is that when it’s time to prep for a
game, the well is dry and you’re out of ideas to develop. When this happens there are
two things a GM can do: try to get something written by brute force, a painful and
tedious process, or cancel the upcoming session. Canceling can be dangerous for the
long-term health of a campaign; too many cancelations and a campaign can collapse.

The other side effect of not doing enough brainstorming is an overall lack of origi-
nality in our sessions. When we don’t brainstorm enough, we retreat to ideas that are
established and safe for us. We draw upon ideas that we may have used in previous
campaigns or we dress up ideas from other GMs. We can become desperate and
blatantly take ideas from TV, movies, or books. While there are good ways to take
ideas from other media and use them creatively, desperation often leads GMs to take
ideas without obscuring their origin.

When We Do Too Much

It’s hard to make a case for brainstorming too much, but it can happen. We can get
overly excited about coming up with ideas and overexert ourselves in this phase. Re-
ally, the only downside to brainstorming too much is that you may not be spending
enough time working on other phases, which will cause problems in those areas. If
you’re going to brainstorm heavily, make sure you have the time and a way to capture
all those ideas. It’s terrible to put in the effort to come up with a mountain of ideas
only to forget them because you didn’t have a good way to capture them all.

Techniques for Improving

If you don’t feel like your brainstorming skills are strong, or are just looking for ways
to get better at it, there are ways to improve in this area. The ultimate goal is to be
able to start generating ideas on command and to be able to come up with a short
list of ideas during a few minutes of concentrated effort. Here’s how you can become
better at brainstorming.

Brainstorm on Command

Like getting to Carnegie Hall, the trick to being able to brainstorm on command is
to practice. Dedicate some time to sitting down and writing ideas each day or a few
times a week. Do some freeform brainstorming by asking open-ended questions,
and do some focused brainstorming exercises as well. The more often you do this,
the more practiced your mind will become at getting into that creative space quickly.

24

Brainstorming

Brainstorm Anywhere

Once you are comfortable brainstorming on command, take it out for a spin. Get
comfortable with brainstorming in different places, such as standing in line at the
grocery store, or on the drive to work, or when your co-workers are late for the next
meeting. The goal here is to get out of needing to be in a quiet place or specific loca-
tion to brainstorm. The reason why you want to be able to do this is so that you can
utilize those little slices of time during the day to work on your prep. (We’ll talk
more about that later on.)

When brainstorming “out in the field,” you will need to make sure your focus re-
mains tight, as distractions from the things going on around you can easily derail the
process. When I find my focus slipping I repeat the opening question to myself over
and over until I get my focus back, or I read the list of ideas that I’ve come up with
so far. The other thing that you will need to address is how you’re going to capture
your ideas. If you’re sitting in a classroom waiting for class to start, getting your ideas
down is easy—but driving on the highway in the middle of the afternoon commute
is going to require a good memory or some digital tools.

Artist: Matt Morrow 25

Chapter 3 True Story:
Storm Clouds on
Brainstorm Faster the Express Lane

Practice will make you faster at generat- During the summer of my junior
ing ideas, but there are two additional year of college, I was a cashier at a
ways to pick up the pace at which you grocery store by day and ran an Am-
brainstorm. The first is to work hard ber Diceless Role-Playing campaign
not to critique or second-guess your for my friends twice a week in the
ideas (see the next chapter for more on evenings. My prep time for having a
that). If you’re unconsciously combining full evening’s session (with up to four
brainstorming with the selection phase, separate storylines) written up and
then your overall speed will be slower ready to run was no more than three
than if you were just brainstorming. days. To accomplish this task I began
Don’t pass judgment on ideas as they brainstorming at work while ringing
surface; get them captured and move up groceries. I would stand with this
on. Once you’ve captured them, you can semi-blank stare, my hands grasping
come back and be more critical about for items to drag across the scanner
them. while my mind churned out ideas.
While the customer paid or wrote a
The second way to speed up your brain- check (yes, I am that old), I would
storming is to keep your mind fed with write my ideas down on the backs of
books, movies, songs, and other media. a small pad of price correction forms.
In essence brainstorming is coming up I would fill several pages with ideas
with associations between something during the course of a day and come
you need, in this case the framing ques- home each night with a sheaf of these
tion that kicks off the exercise, and the small papers in my pocket. When
potential solutions you conceive. Those the campaign finished at the end of
solutions come out of making associa- the summer, I had hundreds of these
tions between things that are rattling little papers. If it wasn’t for that men-
around in your brain. So when you read tal free time to brainstorm, there’s no
an article in a magazine, watch a movie, way I could have kept the up with the
or listen to the lyrics of a song, those el- pace of that campaign.
ements, themes, and ideas are digested
and, at some level, stored in your mem-
ory. The more of those elements that are
floating around in your mind, the more
quickly associations are going to be made
and the faster ideas will come together.

Years ago when I was trying to come up with an idea for a campaign, I got the no-
tion to use elements of Gone with the Wind as the foundation for the game. There’s no
way that I would have been able to do that had I not watched the movie—not one I
would normally have watched, but I was trying to impress my girlfriend (now wife)
at the time. Feed your mind and you’ll have more—and better, and different—ideas
to choose from in the next phase: selection, the subject of the following chapter.

26

Brainstorming

Rate Your Skill Level

Now it’s your turn. For this book to be of the most use to you, you’re going to have
to do some introspection. How will you know what you want to improve until you
understand your current skill level? This simple two-question test will give you some
guidance. Take a moment and consider the following:

Frequency

On a scale of 1-5, how often do you brainstorm ideas as the first step
of your prep process for the sessions you are planning to run?

1 - Never (I never brainstorm; rather 4 - Regularly (Brainstorming is an
I hope for sparks of inspiration) established part of my prep process)

2 - Infrequently (I only brainstorm 5 - Always (I am constantly
if I’m totally out of ideas) brainstorming ideas, and I do
it anywhere I have free time
3 - Occasionally (I brainstorm to think about my game)
between every few sessions)

Strength

On a scale of 1-5, when you brainstorm how would you
rate your skill level at coming up with ideas?

1 - Non-existent (When I’m 4 - Skilled (I can brainstorm in most
done brainstorming I still places and can come up with a
have a blank sheet of paper) list of ideas with little effort)

2 - Weak (I get a few ideas 5 - Master (When I need ideas, I can
after considerable work) come up with them anywhere and
in a very short amount of time)
3 - Competent (With some
dedicated time and some quiet,
I can get some ideas down)

Adding those numbers together will give you a rating between 2 (unskilled) and 10
(mastery), with 6 being an average score. That’s a rough representation of your cur-
rent skill at brainstorming.

Now take a look at the difference between your Strength and Frequency scores. If
there’s a big difference between the two, focus your efforts on evening the scores out.
If there is little or no difference between the two, then focus on improving your Fre-
quency score first to get a bit more out of brainstorming, as an increase in Frequency
will have the side effect of increasing your Strength score.

27

Chapter 4:
Selection

In a swirling sea of options and possibilities, the path to greatness can be obscured.
Your path to a great session lies in finding an idea that will grow into that great
session. Some ideas are truly inspired; some are good but will require effort to yield
their fruit; others are interesting to consider, but will never hold up to the rigors of
full development; and some are poison—bad ideas which tempt you with promises
that will never be kept, and which can drive enjoyment out of your next session.

How you sift through your many ideas and separate the wheat from the chaff depends
on your ability to understand the game you’re running, the strengths and weaknesses
of your GMing skills, and the players and characters that will be involved. From that
foundation you can assess which ideas are viable and focus on them.

In the brainstorming phase you generated all manner of ideas, without judgment or
bias. That freedom was necessary to allow your mind to reach beyond its comfort
zone to come up with truly inspired ideas. In this phase you need to regard those
ideas with a critical eye and embrace the notion that some ideas are better than oth-
ers.

A Discerning Mind’s Eye

The selection phase is where you take your unfiltered list of ideas and review it—
mindful of your game, your players, and yourself—with the goal of selecting an idea
that is strong enough to become a great gaming session. Whereas brainstorming is a
skill, selection is more of a discipline. It’s something that requires a level of detach-
ment, requiring you to check your ego at the door and to make selections that are
best for the group rather than for individuals—including yourself as the GM.

During the selection process, you will take a list of ideas and look for one or more
that will be a sound foundation that you can develop into a session. Ideas will be
evaluated against a set of criteria, and the good ones will be those that best fit the
criteria. Lesser ideas will be those that aren’t a good fit for one or more criteria,
whether they’re not quite right or they just plain stink.

Your criteria need to include areas that are important in your game. By understand-
ing each of those areas, you’ll be able to evaluate external ideas and look at them
critically from several different angles. The ideas that look the best from multiple
perspectives are the ones that have the best potential to be developed into great ses-
sions.

Four elements form the basis of the major criteria: players, GMing, the game, and
the campaign.

28

Selection

Know Your Players

Within a given group of people, individual taste in movies varies greatly. Some peo-
ple love action movies, some enjoy science fiction, and others love political thrillers.
When it comes to roleplaying games, players are no different: Some players love a
long dungeon crawl while others want to play out trade negotiations. Understanding
what your players enjoy during play will help you determine whether or not a given
idea is going to work for your group.

While there are many sources of advice on understanding what kinds of players you
have and the various player archetypes, the definitive source is still Robin’s Laws of
Good Game Mastering. Absent this book, you can of course come up with your own
categories for your players. Virtually all roleplaying games encompass at least these
three activities:

• Roleplaying (Acting and speaking • Problem Solving (Coming up
in character, talking to NPCs) with the big heist, running the
long con, solving the mystery)
• Combat (Getting into fights,
defeating monsters, starship battles)

Artist: Christopher Reach 29

Chapter 4

Think about your players and what kinds of things they like to do in the game. Most
players enjoy all three elements above, but it’s not uncommon for someone to get the
most out of just one facet of the game.

Knowing what types of players you have will help you select ideas for your sessions.
You might have a great idea for a complex mystery, but if none of your players are
really into problem-solving then this is likely an idea that they won’t enjoy—at least
not in its current form.

Know Your GMing Style

All GMs have strengths and weaknesses. Some GMs love to act out every NPC,
some love to plan and play out huge combats, and others like to run political dra-
mas. We’re always most comfortable when we play to our strengths, and always less
comfortable when we leave our comfort zones. I’ll revisit this topic in a moment,
but for now take a moment to think about the kind of GM you are, and about your
strengths and weaknesses, by answering the questions below:

• Do you like to convey lots of • What are your favorite parts of a
details in-game, or do you session (combat, roleplaying with
skim over the little things? your players, creating challenges)?

• What are your favorite types of • Do you like to present
adventures to run (thrillers, dun- challenges for your players and
geon crawls, political dramas)? then sit back and watch as they
try to overcome them, or are you
• Do you enjoy acting out your more collaborative in working with
NPCs’ actions or are you more your players to create a story?
subdued in your delivery?
• Are you good at managing a lot of
• Do you prefer adventures that details and moving parts or do
fit into one session or those you prefer things to be more
that last for several sessions? streamlined?

• Do you enjoy running a
slower-paced game, or do you
prefer a more frantic pace?

Based on your answers to these questions, you should have a good feel for your com-
fort zone as a GM. When you review your ideas during prep, consider that any idea
you develop, you’ll eventually have to run as the GM. You are likely to be naturally
attracted to ideas that fit within your comfort zone and repelled by those that fall
outside of it.

As one example, my personal preference is for complex stories with simple combats.
I have never enjoyed coming up with a full spell list for an NPC, and the order they
will cast spells, and on whom, and on what turn. When I select ideas I tend to shy

30

Selection

away from those that will force me to design a complex combat, but I’m drawn to
ideas that lead to complex narrative scenes.

Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone

We all have comfort zones, but we shouldn’t let ourselves become content with stay-
ing inside them. As a GM you should, from time to time, push your boundaries and
expand your comfort zone by running the types of games (and sessions, and stories)
that you aren’t comfortable running. That being said, there are times when doing so
isn’t ideal. In the first few sessions of a game, for example, you should play it safe
so that you lay a solid foundation for your campaign. Also, when you get close to a
climax in the story, it’s better to use plots that have a high comfort level for you so
that you can deliver strong sessions during this critical part of the campaign.

When you do step out of your comfort zone, be sure to account for some additional
time in your prep so that you can do a little extra work to support the areas where
you are weakest. For instance, in order for me to run a complex fantasy combat I
know I’m going to have to devote extra time to reading up on spells, and I might
even want to create a spellcasting cheat sheet. I’ll allow myself extra prep time to
accomplish this additional work.

Know Your Game

Games, like players and GMs, are better at some things than others. Not all ideas
can be elegantly played using any game system. I stress the word “elegantly” because
you can play most styles of games under any set of rules, but some systems will make
your job a lot easier depending on what you want to do with them. Consider the
game you’re running and the strengths and weakness of that system. For example,
does your game feature:

• A highly tactical combat • A robust skill system?
system or a lighter one?
• A fluid magic system for
• A social combat system (i.e., creating effects on the fly?
rules for verbal sparring and
convincing other charac- • A system that enables players to
ters to do what you want)? take narrative control of the story?

• Rules for aerial combat? • Rules for mass combat?

• A fear/horror/sanity system? • Rules for kingdom building?

• Good rules for creating a heist?

When you’re evaluating an idea, consider the question “How will the rules support

this idea?” You don’t have to discard an idea because your rules aren’t a good fit, but

you might want to discard it if there’s no solid basis for handling that idea in

your game of choice. 31

Chapter 4

For example, consider an idea for a complex treaty negotiation between two king-
doms. If you’re running Advanced Dungeons & Dragons® 2nd Edition it can be done,
but mostly outside of the rules. In Dungeons & Dragons® 3rd Edition, there are rules
for using Diplomacy in this situation, which may make that system a better fit. In
Burning Wheel®, however, there’s a Duel of Wits system for playing social combats
that’s a perfect fit for this premise. You can run the treaty negotiation in any of those
systems (or countless others), but it will likely work better in some than others.

Know Your Campaign

The campaign that you’re running is another area of consideration when selecting
ideas. Any campaign, from a packaged setting like Dragonlance® to a homebrewed
world, will place constraints on what does and doesn’t fit into the setting. That’s why
it’s important to look at whether or not your idea fits the game world, not just the
game mechanics.

Ideas which fall outside of the expectations of the game world can destroy player
buy-in, and can prevent your players from being able to immerse themselves in the
game because of the logical inconsistencies that they introduce. For instance, having
space aliens invade your Dragonlance® campaign in flying saucers is likely to cause a
disruption at your table.

While some genre blending can lead to great gaming moments (the classic AD&D®
module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a perfect example of this), it’s best to focus
your selection on ideas that conform to the logic of the campaign world. If you want
to push those boundaries, it’s a good idea to discuss this with your players in advance
in order to make sure that they’re interested in playing that kind of game. You don’t
have to reveal your whole idea, but you can tease them with something along these
lines: “What if your police detectives were to uncover clues that lead to them discov-
ering the existence of alien life forms?”

From Multiple Angles

With some understanding of your players, your own style, and the game you’re play-
ing, you can now look at your ideas objectively. When I do this, I run my ideas
through a mental filter that looks something like this:

1. On the surface, do I think 3. Is this something that I want
the idea is interesting? (Most to run and, if so, is there
likely I do, since it’s from anything special I need to
my brainstorming list) take into consideration?

2. Is this something that my 4. Does this idea fit into my
players will want to play? campaign setting?
(As a personal rule, I put my
players’ desires before my own) 5. Do the mechanics of the game
support this type of idea?
32

Selection

There are only two deal breakers on the list: If my players wouldn’t play it, or if I
don’t want to run it, then the idea won’t work. If I don’t think the idea is that inter-
esting, there’s still time to punch it up in the next phase, and if the mechanics of the
game don’t support it I can always work around that.

When We Do Too Little

When you grab any old idea you’ve come up with and run with it, that’s doing
too little selection. Sometimes the only thing that drives the selection process is its
alignment to your comfort zone and that presents a few problems.

Letting Bad Ideas Slip In

When you don’t objectively look at how an idea will compare to the desires of your
players, your GMing style, and the game you’re running, you run the risk of putting
development time into a bad idea. The idea will have failed in one or more areas: it
may be boring or offensive to your players, leading to a bad session at the table; it may
be an idea which you can’t effectively pull off as a GM, causing stumbling during
your next session; or it could be an idea that isn’t well supported by the rules, leading
to breaks in the action or arguments over rules and rulings. If this happens too often
during a campaign, interest in the game will wane.

Running the Game Solely for Yourself

When you pick an idea based on a gut feeling or how cool you think it is, you run an-
other risk: running the game you want to run, not necessarily the game your group
wants to play. Whether by accident or, less likely, out of hubris, you stop accounting
for your players’ interests; the game is the game, and they can get on board or not.
If things reach this point, you’ve failed in one of your core GMing duties: helping to
create an enjoyable group experience.

When this happens, it’s often accompanied by a huge disconnect: The GM is hav-
ing the time of his life running a great story which he has fallen in love with, while
his players are having a boring or terrible time because parts of the game—or the
whole campaign—don’t appeal to them. This type of game can’t be sustained and
will eventually implode as players withdraw their support.

When We Do Too Much

Spending too much time on the selection process is often the result of one of two

issues: an inability to select an idea or the elimination of too many ideas. In both

cases the end result is that potentially good ideas are being left behind. When you’re

too selective you wind up rooting yourself firmly in your comfort zone, and while

that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll run a bad session, it does mean that you

aren’t growing as a GM. It also means that, over time, your stories will show a lack

of originality. 33

Artist: Matt Morrow

The problem with not selecting ideas efficiently is that it delays the start of the rest of
your prep, causing you to have to rush through the other phases; this in turn creates
stress. It can also force you to cut corners as you speed through subsequent phases,
which can lead to other problems (as we’ll discuss later on). When a game feels
rushed, it’s often due to a lack of polish during prep or to the GM’s visible uneasi-
ness about not spending enough time preparing the adventure. Players notice these
things.

Techniques for Improvement

If your ability to select good ideas is rusty or underdeveloped, fear not: There are
ways to improve your skills. Here are a few specific areas that you can work on.

Keep ‘Em Separated

The most important thing to do is to first recognize this skill—selecting good
ideas—as a formal part of your prep. GMs often blend brainstorming and selection
together: They start coming up with a list of ideas, but then jump on the first idea
that looks good and run with it. This can lead to two problems.

The first is that because a full round of brainstorming wasn’t completed, the first
good idea might not be as good as one that would have arisen out of continued
brainstorming. The second is that jumping on an idea right away short circuits an

34

Selection

important part of the process: looking at ideas objectively and from different levels.
Skipping that element can lead to the issues described in the section When We Do
Too Little, above.

Be Introspective

Your ability to recognize an idea that will work for your group and your game is
based on the personal filter you create for sifting through your ideas. The way to cre-
ate, or refine, that filter is to increase your knowledge of your players, your GMing
style, and the game you’re playing.

If you don’t know what types of gamers your players are, it’s worth figuring that
out. Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering does an excellent job of categorizing play-
ers into understandable archetypes, and I recommend picking up a copy. Once you
know the makeup of your group, it will be clear what kinds of adventures they’ll like
and dislike, making selecting ideas much easier.

To learn your GMing style, ask your players for feedback. Your players, especially if
your group has been playing for some time, know exactly what type of GM you are.
We never see ourselves the way others see us, so it’s likely that you don’t know what
you’re like as a GM. If you’re not thick-skinned or used to objective criticism, this
can be an uncomfortable process, and one that many people avoid. If you’re nervous
about asking directly, send out an anonymous survey and get your feedback that way.
Once you know your style you’ll know what ideas play to your strengths.

Take some time to look at the game you’re running and consider what it does well
and what it does poorly. If you’ve played a lot of different games, you’ll probably rec-
ognize what aspects of the rules are strong, weak, and non-existent. If you haven’t
had exposure to a lot of other games, then do some research: Read reviews of the
game and see what reviewers have said about it, or visit gaming forums like RPGnet
(rpg.net), or those hosted by gaming companies and fans, and ask for help.

Construct Your Filter

Once you know what makes an idea worth spending development time on, the next
thing to do is to prioritize them and decide what’s most important to you. For ex-
ample, is it more important that the idea will be fun for your players, or that the rules
support it well? Or is it more important that the idea fall within your comfort zone,
after which you can consider whether or not your players will like it? Those priorities
will refine your ability to make your selections.

If your issue is that you’re making the wrong selections, then go back and check your
priorities to see if putting them in a different order would result in better selections.
If the issue isn’t your priorities, then review what you know about your players, your
GMing style, and your game to see if you’re making assumptions based on bad data.

35

Chapter 4

Rate Your Skill Level

How are your selection skills? Take a moment to quantify your skill level using the
criteria below.

Frequency

On a scale of 1-5, how often do you formally select ideas from your
list of brainstormed ideas for the sessions you’re planning?

1 - Never (I just grab the first idea 4 - Regularly (I make sure I pick
that looks good and run with it) the best idea on the list before
I start writing)
2 - Infrequently (I only think about
selection when I have more than 5 - Always (I evaluate all of my ideas
one good idea on the list) before I pick one for a game)

3 - Occasionally (I go over the list, flag
a few good ideas between sessions,
and stick with those until they
run out)

Strength

On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate your ability
to be objective about selecting ideas?

1 - Non-existent (I run what I think 4 - Skilled (I know what kind of
is going to be cool, and don’t GM I am and I know what types
worry about what others think) of players I have, so I look for
the best fit)
2 - Weak (I run what I want as long as
I don’t think my players will hate it.) 5 - Mastery (I know my players,
myself, and the game I am
3 - Competent (I look for ideas that running and I make sure an
are going to be fun to run and idea will work in all areas)
that I think my players will like)

Adding those numbers up will give you a rating between 2 (unskilled) and 10 (mas-
tery), with an average being a 6. As before, look at the difference between your
ratings in each area and focus on raising the lower score. If both are equal, then
start by improving the Strength of this skill, so that when you do take time to select
ideas you’ll select better ones. As your ability to make good selections improves you
will reject more ideas, which will force you to review and select ideas more often.
Your initial list will take on a whole new life. 

36

Selection

True Story:
Some Ideas Get Better With Age

When I start a campaign, I do an initial round of brainstorming to come up
with ideas that seem appealing for the game I’m going to run. At this point I
don’t know much about the characters or the game world. My selection of the
idea that will form the basis for the first session gets made based on a gut feeling
rather than a more refined set of criteria.

I always keep that initial brainstorming list, adding to it in subsequent brain-
storming sessions; I never take anything off the list. Later on in the campaign,
when it’s time to select more ideas, I go back to my list and start from the top.

What I have found is that as I revisit the list, those same initial concepts be-
come more and more interesting as I know more about the characters and the
campaign. After a session where the PCs were betrayed by the local baron, that
half-formed idea about overthrowing the local ruler suddenly becomes more
appealing.  Brainstorming is naked and raw, creating something from nothing.
Selection is all about context, and the longer your game runs the deeper your
context becomes—and the more likely it is that weaker ideas from your initial
list will take on a whole new life. 

Artist: Christopher Reach 37

Chapter 5:
Conceptualization

An idea is just a seed; it is compact and immature. For it to grow into something
that you can use, you’re going to need to plant it in the soil of your mind, let it take
root, and allow it to grow and to eventually flower. The act of expanding an idea into
something that can be played, be it a scene or a full session, is called conceptualiza-
tion.

This process began with a flood of ideas, and by applying some insight based on your
knowledge of your players, GMing style, game, and campaign, you plucked out an
idea to be used for your upcoming session. Now that idea must be expanded and
transformed into a logical session, adventure, or story through a series of questions
and answers.

When you conceptualize an idea you need to think it through like a story that you’re
going to play at the gaming table. Like any story, it will need to begin, progress along
a logical path, and come to some conclusion. That doesn’t mean it has to be linear,
or that story trumps player choice; rather, it’s a framework for conceptualization. If
your session were a story, what would it need to include? You’ll need locations and
key NPCs, scenes that flow well (and, if applicable, into each other), a dramatic pos-
sible conclusion, and more—with no plot holes or other inconsistencies.

In this phase you’ll be coming up with a lot of information. Depending on how good
your memory is, you may want to take some notes. The goal for this phase is not to
create detailed, structured session notes, but rather to become familiar with the full
scope of the session. If taking notes helps you to do that, there’s nothing wrong with
that.

It’s In the Details

If you’re like most people, you learned the process of conceptualization at an early
age—when you learned to write. At its core, this process can be summed up by five
classic questions: Who? What? Where? Why? How? (In gaming “When?” is gener-
ally a foregone conclusion: “When the adventure takes place,” usually in the next
session.) These questions taught you to create details based on an idea, which is the
perfect place to start.

Take the idea you selected in the previous phase of the prep process and ask yourself
the questions below. In order to provide clear examples, the questions in this section
are geared towards a traditional fantasy game (good guy PCs vs. bad evil villains),
but that’s not to imply that they only work for that genre or style of game.

38

Conceptualization

Who—Who’s after the MacGuffin? Who’s trying to stop the PCs?
Who are the NPCs who will be involved?

What—What are the PCs looking for? What will happen to move
this session along? What will make this scene more exciting? What
will happen if the PCs fail? What will the villain do to retaliate if
they succeed?

Where—Where will the PCs be when the session begins? Where do
they need to be when it ends? Where will the session take place?
Where are the villains lurking?

Why—Why would the PCs want to help? Why does the villain need
to succeed? Why is there a powerful curse on the temple?

How—How will the PCs get to the dungeon? How will the villain
set his defenses? How is the trap triggered? How will the NPCs be
changed after this session?

By asking these questions you’re prompting your mind to come up with answers that
expand the original idea into a story. Through this process of questions and answers
you not only expand the story, but also become comfortable with it. When your
players go off in an unexpected direction, that level of comfort will aid you in keep-
ing the game exciting and bringing the session to a fun conclusion.

In addition to the basic questions above, there are some specific questions I like to
make sure that I can answer about an idea. These questions help me to formulate
the logical reasoning behind the story. When there’s a logic gap in a session, you
run the risk of a player noticing it and having it jar them out of their immersion and
enjoyment of the game. The more logical your story is the better it will flow. In some
cases the answers to these questions don’t need to be presented to your players—just
knowing them will help you run a better game.

Goal—What is the struggle within this story?

PC Motivation—Why are the PCs going to want to partake in this
story?

Opposition—Who or what is the person or force that is preventing
the PCs from completing the story?

Opposition Motivation—Why is the person or force opposed to the
PCs?

39

Chapter 5

After understanding the logic of the story I then like to do my casting. This is where
I figure out what interesting locations and NPCs will be part of the story. Some of
this will have been worked out by answering the questions above, but not all of it.

PCs’ Allies—Who are the friends of the PCs? Why would they
help? What can they do?

Opposition’s Allies—Who are the friends of the opposition? Why
would they want to help? What can they do?

Other Interesting Characters—Who else will the PCs encounter
during the course of the session?

Locations—What are some interesting locations where this story
could take place? Where are those places located?

Seventh Grade Composition

Now with some understanding of what’s at stake, the motivations of the major par-
ties, and some interesting locations and NPCs, it’s time to lay out the session. There
are as many ways to plan an adventure as there are to write a story, but I like to
stick with the basics: The tried-and-true dramatic structure that I learned in seventh
grade.

Introduction—How does the story begin? In a tavern, on a routine
patrol? Based on player and PC motivation, we know that once the
PCs encounter the problem they will want to see it to conclusion.

Rising Action—What steps will the PCs take to confront the op-
position? Is there going to be combat? A tense negotiation? Some
social manipulation? Depending on the length of the story, I like
3-4 of these scenes.

Climax—Where will the PCs confront the opposition to determine
who will win and who will fail? What will the opposition do to
prepare for that confrontation?

Dénouement—What happens if the PCs succeed? What happens if
they don’t?

When I feel like I can outline the entire session, I know I’ve reached the end of this
phase of prep. I like to allocate a day or two of real time to think about it, because
it’s rare for me to be able to conceptualize the whole session in one sitting. I prefer to
answer a few questions while driving to work, answer a few more while waiting for
a meeting to start, and get the rest of my thinking done the next day while at home.
I make as much time for the conceptualization phase as I do for the documentation

phase (phase four, which we’ll cover in the next chapter).

40

Conceptualization

Knowledge is Power

As in the selection phase, the better you understand your players, your campaign,
and your game, the better your answers to the questions covered in this phase will
be. An idea can grow into a session in many different ways, each with their own
unique path from introduction to dénouement. When you ask and answer the ques-
tions in this chapter, keep these things in mind:

What kind of players do I have? Knowing that your players prefer
combat to negotiation will lead to one type of session, while gam-
ing with a group that prefers elaborate social plots will lead to an-
other kind of session.

How does this idea fit into my campaign? A campaign is a collection
of stories. You want this story to fit the tone of your campaign, and
you want it to be something that would be believable within the
game world. For example, would a session about a plot to overthrow
the emperor work in a kingdom that has known peace for a thou-
sand years? Probably not—but it might work well if all wasn’t what
it seemed, and the kingdom were actually seething with discontent.

What mechanics will be used in this session? The story you create is
going to be expressed in part through the mechanics of the game.
You will want to make sure that your game provides the mechanics
needed (and that you know them well enough to use them with-
out stumbling), or be comfortable enough to create what you need
within the system. For example, a story about a tense shipboard
race through dangerous waters is going to require more work to pull
off with a system that lacks chase mechanics.

Conceptualizing Scenes

The techniques for conceptualizing sessions described in this chapter can, with a bit
of tweaking here and there, also be applied to conceptualizing individual scenes.
Sessions are made up of a series of scenes, whether those are planned or arise organi-
cally during play, and when you prep a scene you need to know the answers to most
of the basic questions:

What’s the purpose of this scene?

Who’s in this scene, and what are their motivations?

Where is this scene taking place?

When is this scene taking place?

41

Chapter 5

Answer the questions that make sense for the scene, ignore the ones that don’t, and
you’ll be well prepared for every scene. You can even circle back to this phase during
the documentation phase, and use these tools to refine a specific scene that you’re
outlining.

When We Do Too Little

When conceptualization is shortchanged or eliminated it’s often the session itself
that suffers. On its own, an idea isn’t enough to be a story. An idea is a great start,
but without additional details it will lack the dramatic elements necessary to create
a positive and memorable experience at the gaming table. Your players will quickly
identify, often through painful experience, the corners that you cut during prep.
Here are the three most common problem areas when it comes to conceptualization.

Logic Gaps

Logic gaps are one of the most obvious signs that you didn’t do enough conceptu-
alization. If you forgot to consider the opposition’s motivations, your players won’t
understand why the opposition is involved in the adventure. If you overlooked the
connecting elements between scenes, causing the opening scene to be set on Earth
and the next scene to be set at Moon Base Delta, that’s going to be jarring for your
players.

42 Artist: Christopher Reach

Conceptualization

Another common issue is creating an obstacle without considering the tools the PCs
have at their disposal, allowing them to circumvent it in a way that isn’t much fun
for anyone. For example, you might create a villain and his lair in a hurry, including a
few traps and several encounters to wear down the PCs, but you forget that the PCs
possess teleportation and remote viewing magic. The PCs use scrying to locate the
villain, teleport there, and sidestep the entire adventure. Whether you let them do it
or make up an excuse for why that approach doesn’t work, neither solution will feel
satisfying for most groups. (Contrast this with a scenario where the PCs didn’t have
those capabilities but spent time and effort acquiring them in order to accomplish
the same goal; that’s a clever solution to the problem, and everyone would have had
fun in the process.)

The most painful logic gap arises when you don’t ensure that the PCs have reasons
to undertake an adventure. Once your players start questioning why their characters
should care about the mission, crisis, or situation that’s on the docket, you’re left with
very few options—all of them bad. You can ask your players to just go along with
it, dump the material you prepped and improvise a new adventure on the spot, or
railroad the PCs into the adventure. All three options will sour your players’ enjoy-
ment of the game.

The Blahs

It’s all too easy to cover all of the important areas of conceptualization without doing
so in a creative or imaginative way. With time running out to prepare the session,
or because you’ve slipped back into your comfort zone, you take the easy way out
instead of coming up with creative and imaginative answers to the questions in this
chapter. The result is a logical, consistent story that’s also whitewashed, less exciting,
or—worst of all—boring.

For example, imagine a sci-fi game where the PCs are going to battle a band of space
pirates in the cargo hold of a ship. Which version of the cargo hold sounds like more
fun?

A. The cargo hold is full of boxes.

B. The cargo hold is full of boxes that are being picked up, moved,
and set down by automated drones. The drones ignore the combat-
ants, but as the boxes are moved they reveal, conceal, and provide
cover to both the PCs and the pirates. Clever PCs may be able to
hack into the drones, ride them, or otherwise put them to creative
uses.

Both are cargo holds, both are reasonable locations for a combat, but the first one is
going to be just another fight while the second will lead to a battle your players will
remember.

43

Chapter 5

Slow to Document

When you take an idea and immediately start writing session notes around it—
in other words, go straight from brainstorming to documentation, skipping this
phase—it doesn’t usually go well. There are too many details missing, so you have to
stop and think about what to write for each part, pause to consider each detail, etc.
The end result is a slow, frustrating documentation phase during which you write,
then must pause to collect your thoughts and come up with new ideas before writing
some more, and so on.

This process is painful and time-consuming. It takes much less time to document
something you’ve fully thought out and are comfortable with than it does to hap-
hazardly document an underdeveloped idea. The longer it takes to document your
game the more you run the risk of not finishing in time, which leads to not having
all your notes for a session or to canceling the session altogether. To avoid canceling
the session you may push harder to keep writing, raising your frustration and stress
levels about the game.

When We Do Too Much

When we conceptualize too much we begin to over think the session or scene. There
are two major pitfalls related to over thinking your prep.

Too Much Detail

A problem has an infinite number of solutions, but your players will only ever pick
one. As a GM, you shouldn’t try to consider every possible solution, but rather to
cover the most likely one. When you try to account for every possibility, you’re using
up mental energy on things that most likely won’t come up in the game. It’s better
to expend energy on the most likely solution, plus perhaps the two next most likely
contingencies if you have time.

This can be tricky to figure out at first, but when you’re comfortable with your players
it becomes obvious what solutions they’ll try first in most situations. As you come to
understand that, you will know which solutions to focus on and which ones to avoid
thinking too much about.

Bloated Session Notes

The other downside to over thinking a scene or session is the need to document all
the additional details that are involved. When you do this, you create bloated, overly
long session notes, only a small fraction of which will get used during the game.
Those notes will contain useful elements as well as unnecessary detail, of course, but
you’ll have to sift through the chaff to get to the wheat during play—and that takes
up even more time.

44

Conceptualization

Techniques for Improvement

Conceptualization is like any other skill: It can be learned and improved. Here are
a few techniques that can help you enhance your ability to create great adventures.

Conceptualization Is Its Own Step

Much like brainstorming and selection are too often combined into one hybrid step,
it’s easy to do the same with conceptualization and documentation. To improve at
conceptualization you need to dedicate time to this step and make it separate from
documentation. Because most of conceptualization is a mental exercise and doesn’t
require writing, this process can be performed anywhere you like as long as you have
some time to think.

We’ll cover how to utilize downtime to prep for your game in more detail later on,
but like brainstorming you can conceptualize while driving, waiting for a dental ap-
pointment, or standing in line at the grocery store. When you have a few minutes to
think, just take the idea or scene and start to work it out in your head. Ask yourself
the questions and listen to the answers. The more mental prep you do by conceptu-
alizing the scene, the more prepared you’ll be when you sit down to document your
notes.

Go in Circles

Sometimes the answers to the questions in this chapter don’t come easy. One or two
will come quickly, but the others are slow to form. You can smooth things out by
making conceptualization an iterative process: Answer some of the questions, sum
up what you have determined, and then ask the next questions. For instance:

“The fight with the space pirates will take place on the ship.
Okay, on the ship, but where? Engine room? No, too secure.
Bridge? No, how would they have gotten there? Cargo hold?
Yes. Cargo hold is good.

Okay, so the fight takes place in the cargo hold. What’s happen-
ing in there while the fight is going on? Maybe the boxes are
moving around? How? Automated lifts are picking them up
and moving them. Why? The ship’s AI is optimizing the cargo
for unloading at the next stop.”

That exchange of internal dialog could have happened all at once, say while driving
to work, or you could have thought through the first paragraph while waiting in line
at the coffee shop and the second paragraph while out grocery shopping later in the
day. If you can retain what you came up with in your head, that’s excellent—but if
not, be sure to jot down a sentence or two so that you won’t forget any details.

45

Artist: Matt Morrow

True Story: The Columbo Question

As an IT project manager, I spend a lot of time working with teams to design
systems and software. In most cases my job is just to ask questions and keep
everyone talking. Rarely am I the guy who has the answer to the problem; I’m
the guy that gets the person who does have the answer to make that solution
surface. When things get quiet at the table I often ask what I call a “Columbo
question.” In the TV show Columbo, which first aired in the 1960s, the titular
character would ask a series of innocuous questions to get suspects to drop their
guard before slipping in the real question, which was simple and asked in a self-
deprecating way. This question always prompted the killer to blurt out some-
thing they shouldn’t have said. A good Columbo question provokes an almost
involuntary response.

When I conceptualize, I often play the same role in my own head. I ask simple
questions and then answer them, filling in the surface details for the story or
scene. I will keep going in this fashion until all the details are covered, and then
I’ll drop a Columbo question. Most often, this is either “Why would the PCs
be interested in doing that?” or “What would make this scene more exciting?”
When I can answer that question, I know that I understand the story or scene.

46

Conceptualization

Rate Your Skill Level

How are your conceptualization skills? Using the same categories and rankings from
the previous chapters, rate how often you conceptualize and how skilled you are at
this activity.

Frequency

On a scale of 1-5, how often do you carry out conceptualization
separately from the act of writing up your session notes (documentation)?

1 - Never (I don’t do any upfront 4 - Regularly (I make some time to
thinking before I write) think about the overall game and all
the scenes before writing)
2 - Infrequently (I think about the
overall story before I write, but leave 5 - Always (I’m thinking about my
out the details of the scenes until I upcoming game all the time)
start writing)

3 - Occasionally (I think about the
overall story and a few key scenes,
but the rest I work on when I’m
writing)

Strength

On a scale of 1-5, how much detail do you go into during conceptualization?

1 - Non-existent (I never think about 4 - Skilled (I ask the basic questions
details ahead of time, I wing it and look at motivations within the
when I write my notes or run the story and/or scenes)
game)
5 - Mastery (I analyze my ideas from
2 - Weak (I make sure that the overall multiple angles, looking for logical
story follows a loose narrative, but flaws, and don’t stop until I’m
that’s it) satisfied that the story and/or scenes
are sound)
3 - Competent (I ask the basic who/
what/where questions)

As before, add up the numbers to get a score ranging from 2 (unskilled) to 10 (mas-
tery), with the average being a 6. If you scored lower in Frequency, work on plan-
ning some time to make conceptualization a normal part of your prep process (and
on doing it during downtime, like when you’re driving). If your Strength score was
low, focus on coming up with a set of questions you should run through when you’re
working through this process. That way, when you conceptualize you’ll get the most
out of your efforts.

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Chapter 6:
Documentation

Ideas become concepts and concepts become documents. Writing things down has
been important to most cultures since the dawn of civilization—cave drawings be-
came symbols, symbols were joined by syntax, and written language followed. At
the same time, humans have always used verbal communication as well, with its
phonemes and similar syntax. Why have two forms of communication unless both
were equally valuable?

Verbal communication is the medium of the now. It’s how we convey concepts to
those around us, and to those connected by technology such as the phone or a video
chat. It’s fast, but it can be messy; it’s fleeting, and it lacks reproducibility (think of
the children’s game “Telephone”). The written word is the opposite: It is an everlast-
ing medium. It’s slower to produce, but clearer; it’s fixed, and it’s reproducible.

What does that have to do with RPGs? Being a GM is a very hectic job. During the
course of a game you’re likely to be doing more than one thing at any given time, or
doing things in rapid succession. Things like:

• Narrating a story • Reading the mood of the table
• Making a rules judgment • Responding to player questions
• Interpreting the outcome of the dice • Making tactical decisions

That’s a lot to do moment to moment, and doing it requires a great deal of mental
processing power. Now imagine that you have to hold the whole plot for a complex
mystery, with all its red herrings, clues, and the identity of the true killer, in your
mind while doing all of the above. It’s very likely that something is going to get
missed, and the complex mystery will become a confusing mess.

This is where written game notes come in. Your written game notes are static; they’re
your anchors for the game. When you lose focus because of a player question or
other table event, they allow you to pick up where you left off. When your players
throw you a curveball by making an unexpected choice, it’s your notes that enable
you to review what you planned and let your brain make the necessary adjustments.
In a campaign that spans months or years, it’s the everlasting nature of the written
word that allows you to keep track of everything as the game progresses. That’s the
purpose of the documentation phase—the stage of prep where you write everything
down.

This chapter doesn’t focus on the specific content you record or the tools you use
to write or create your session notes; those topics are covered later on. Instead, this
chapter focuses on the process of documenting your ideas and how that process fits
into your prep.

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Documentation

It’s Personal… Very Personal

Documentation is the phase where you record your ideas in a format that will allow
you to access them at a later time. Oftentimes that means written notes, but you’re
not restricted to that format. There are as many ways to document a session as there
are GMs in the world. Some GMs like index cards, others prefer to use a wiki, and
some use sticky notes—if it can be written on or in, chances are a GM somewhere
has tried to use it to record their notes.

Your documentation has a purpose that is often overlooked by many GMs, though.
The true goal of your session notes is to make you comfortable enough to run your
session. As long as your notes enable you to run your game with confidence, it doesn’t
matter what medium you use or how many or few words you write.

There is no magic number of words or pages to write for a session. If writing 20 pages
of detailed notes is what it takes to make you comfortable at the table, then that’s
what you need. If all you need are a few ideas on an index card to be ready to improv
your way through an evening, that’s just fine as well. The worst thing you can do is
need 20 pages of notes but only allow yourself the index card.

There are many things that can be documented in your session notes, including:

Scenes/Encounters—Discrete, usually connected, parts of the ses-
sion. Scenes are more common in story-focused games, while en-
counters are more common in sandbox, tactically-focused, or loca-
tion-based games. Both scenes and encounters include:

Description—To explain the environment to your players

Dialog—Specific things for NPCs to say

Objects—From a rolling boulder to a magical sword, scenes
often include important objects

Stat Blocks—The game statistics for various NPCs and/or monsters
that will come up during the session can be jotted down, or you can
reference the page number in another book where the full stats can
be found.

Maps/Drawings—Pictures of the sites that will be involved in the
session, from crude sketches to elaborate illustrations. Maps can
depict anything from a single bedroom to an entire orbital complex.

Rules—Specific game rules that may come into play during the ses-
sion. These can be rules that you don’t use that often or home-
brewed rules that apply to a specific situation.

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